Platform intent: to become the platform of choice for industrial IOT development.
- With over 1000 developers building the platform, we had enough resources.
- But users were struggling! And you know it's hard when engineers admit to struggling.
- It was because the organization assumed its engineers would build for engineers. They didn't.
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So in addition to focusing on how I understood the particular painpoints, this is also about how I influenced the larger organization to focus on adoption.
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I synthesized a single persona: to help us collaborate on what it means for it to be drop-dead-simple to build an app, so we can become the app store of the IOT.
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GE is a "six sigma" type of organization, where engineers call the shots, so I had to communicate our findings in a comically quantitative way. This is where I started to break up the experience into five key sections.
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I synthesized the solutions into a succinct, high-level list of design guidelines.
These were used by designers to help them think through a comprehensive solution, and to get buy in with engineers and managers about where to invest effort to increase adoption
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This is the next level of detail - there are recommendations for each design principle and each phase of the experience.
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I developed a storyboard that gets into more detail to take the conversation to the next level with product managers, and lead the way for junior designers.
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Each of those sections had a sketch of what the experience should be like. In this case, the homepage, users said the original version felt too "marketing-y", so this sketch suggests the following features:
- Value propositions: one for each major persona
- Community and tutorials - devs often look for strong forums before anything else
- Overview of platform architecture: to get her oriented
- catalog items - don't need to be images for this user
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Here's how the site looked when I was done with it. Our efforts drove tens of thousands of new developers to sign up for Predix, and made it significantly easier for them to build applications.
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Later, I wanted to find out how successful our efforts had been. So I kicked off a new effort with the team of 4 researchers I was leading. Read more about this in my Medium article.
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